The digital TV battle

I had written a whole rant (dutch) about the big digital TV dilemma.
Man, that was boring, so you can be glad I banned it to the archive

Instead I crafted this highly objective chart of the big question: Telenet or Belgacom?



a clear victory for Telenet. Hooray! (can you tell I'm a little internet focused?)
Enter the Telenet guys!
But man ... what a huge disappointment, I don't know who created their digicorder user interface but it's bad ... really bad.
Let's compare it with our TV experience before: a windows media center



Wow! bad points for the digicorder ...
Solution: Connect the video out from the digicorder to the video in of the mediacenter, attach a IR-blaster between the two so you can control the digicorder from the mediacenter and voila!
voila? hmmm, as the digital signal is converted to analog and back to digital, there's some serious quality loss, so you can forget about the HD ... also the program guide is flaky because you can't have AND the EPG for the analog channels AND the EPG for the digicorder in the same interface ...
Here's the comparison

Is the middle "I want it all" solution even possible without losing your sanity? I don't know, but I do know this: I'll be damned if I let Telenet (or Belgacom for that matter) lock me in their proprietary controlled TV experience.
If any other geek has figured out a better TV solution, please DO tell :-)